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Published in C4ISR Journal , June 3, 2009 Article highlight: NGA isn’t the only agency that directly benefits from its CRADAs. Technology developed under NGA CRADAs has been incorporated in major procurements. A 1999 CRADA with geospatial intelligence-tool developer ObjectFX, which focused on displaying situational awareness and common-operating picture data, led to wide applications, according to Steve Panzer, vice president of ObjectFX’s government division. “Our product was really built for the commercial industry, but NGA saw the value of moving our technology into an area where they could make better use of it both for the intelligence community and the defense community,” Panzer said. NGA selected ObjectFX’s SpatialFX product for its Image Exploitation Support System, a geospatial database of imagery and other data. The Army also included the software in its All Source Analysis System and its Tactical Exploitation System, which automate the analysis of intelligence from satellites and airborne sensors. “I don’t think we would have been involved in any of those if we hadn’t done the work under the CRADA initially to be able to handle the NGA formats,” Panzer said. ObjectFX’s current CRADA research has also found applications elsewhere in the intelligence community. The research, which Walls characterizes as “more exploratory,” is focused on processing geospatial intelligence information based on a set of spatial-temporal rules — looking at when events and objects happen within a defined area and time frame, and analyzing deviations from “normal” activities. “We’re looking at merging classified and unclassified, commercial and non-commercial data types,” Walls said. “And they’re not just imagery, they may be signals intelligence, shipping data, tracking data — anything we can pin to a point on the earth at a specific time and look at trends over time. And then from that you can ratchet up the sophistication of analysis tools so that you can develop rules, for instance, that say this is what happens under a normal situations, and if anything happens that’s not normal or outside these rules let me know, and that cues the analyst to take a closer look.” Panzer said that the work done with the spatial-temporal rules engine at NGA, using high volumes of classified data feeds, led directly to another intelligence agency acquiring the technology for a classified program. He said other members of the intelligence community “understood that this product had been tested on classified data sets on very large numbers [and] it had many other potential uses.” As a result of that additional work, ObjectFX has increased the capacity of its commercially available rules engine so that it can track millions of objects and events. “That sort of scalability was a very key test under the CRADA,” Panzer said. |
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